sour like candy
by brombones
Summary: a sequel of sorts to "ice in the mouth (you must eat to survive)". caroline & klaus in summer. complete.


hello hello this is a kind-of sequel to my other kc fic_ ice in the mouth (you must eat to survive)_ also posted here on FF. you don't need to read that to understand this at all. enjoy!

* * *

**sour like candy**

He never thinks of the future. He never imagines what comes next.

This is the rule with them, with her. She says it like she has picked the stars out from lemon seeds and put them in rows. Like he has planted hedges and hedges of black torches and she grows poppies around them, snap dragons that can thrive in the bitterest frost.

She is beautiful, he tells her, _the only one ever **worth** killing_.

And in that way, she knows he loves her.

He has words lined up like soldiers, bombings and terrorism in his teeth. He writes out love in red sand and sours it with his pickled heart, floating in his chest, suspended in brine.

Her teeth are rows of white beach chairs under her smile, her eyes are shut against the wind from the window. Her thin strips of hair flail behind her like streamers, like a celebration, a revolution no one else remembers.

He drives too fast, forgets that motors are mortal like men. The tar rolls under the wheels like snake meat burning on a fire pit. He pops a beer top, comments on how putrid it tastes as the foam bubbles out under his stubbled lip. He drives fast so she can ride with orange heat under her ribs.

There is a sky opening up under their lungs, bigger patches of space manifesting in the tissues. A cool blue pocketed with roaring yellow. Deep breaths and sun in the slivers where their eyelids meet.

There is a soulless summer on the way: full of raucous radio and burning tires and vaporizing asphalt that damages the lungs in subtle ways. There is a cold drink beading condensation in the cupholder, iced tea with lemon and raspberry is the only way to drink it, and Klaus' long fingers unbend for the plastic AC vents, pushing them up, letting the whorls of splintered air reach his lips like his tongue cannot speak without ice and the remembrance of winter.

Now she is driving.

Strawberry pink nails rest around the wheel, the tempo of the carbonators matches the music in the speakers, she keeps flinging her hand out the window, splaying her fingers like sparklers in the wind. He sees her ivory palm pulled open like on strings, there must be a kite held somewhere in the air from an invisible twine attached to each digit. A multicolored kite blown open like a rocket.

_There is a better way to do this_, he says, sweat-tipped curls licking Qs around his white temples, coiling under the lobes of his ears, pressed flat and tired on his forehead. His ageless face is encroached by lines and canyons that betray his assessment, eyes turned towards her, lips red like beet juice in the heat.

_Who says better is better?_ she postulates, makes loud slurping sounds as she sucks her paper cup dry of Coca-Cola through the straw. _Is there a secret council for that or something?_

_What, _he asks, eyes falling shut from the slow hemlock of the summer heat, from the sweet stench of exhaust and the sun with its batting cage hard lines swung through the windshield. _Like the Antagonistic Individuals Convention?_

_Yes,_ she laughs, _just like that._

And just like that, they joke. She asks him if they wear name tags, if Darth Vader's breath smells bad, if the Joker does the opening monologue like at the Oscars or something (and of course no one laughs), if Cruella de Ville ever thought about making a hybrid-skin coat, if Fiona Goode has ever hit on him or tapped her cigarette ashes onto the crotch of his pants. He laughs at the last one, angles his head towards the window, will deny it til his blood beats again.

Klaus is asleep in the passenger seat and Caroline has the window down, she is driving ninety-miles per hour on Route 20 through Georgia, highway flanked with trees as big and as round as the Cyclops against Odysseus, greener than money and youth and spearmint and lime poprocks, everything telling her she'll never grow old.

Klaus has a scar on his chest from a blade that once butchered his body, a witch in New Orleans drove it there and tore it out, a blade that was patted together from all his hieroglyph insecurities and folklore fears. Putty and salt water and island magic. The kind of doubts that plague a nun, the kind of reservations that drain the devil of his sand. The kind that makes the levees blow.

She can see the raised edge of it, sleeping breath bringing its silver-pink tail past the open collar of his shirt. A rattlesnake. His past is a warning, a rattle tinning in the long desert of his life. That scar is an enchanted wound, one that cannot heal even on his body which remakes itself.

She knows the grooves and contours of it, has felt it with the back of her wrist, brushed it when they drunkenly closed into a hotel in Montgomery. He had stared at her. His eyes were black and lingering like licorice, a taste that doesn't ever go away, the kind that gives you cavities and makes you reach for water. There was too much yellow in the room, lamplight and burnt orange lamp shades. Cars outside moving slowly. Alabama neon.

She is a magpie, stealing all of his memories, picking up the shiny things and holding them to her lips and waiting to see if he panics because he thinks he's lost them. _Tell her and she won't have to, _she chastises him. He lets her keep the sparkling trinkets, little things he never thought anyone would wish to know, he explains, little things he learned to forget mattered. Little things that lost flavor, lost color, lost enough proof, like alcohol, to get him to that wobbly state where his knees feel wrecked and his heart feels cindered and his knuckles feel nervous.

The life worth living things.

Caroline taps her fingers on the steering wheel, her daylight ring hits the leather – she is driving him to Atlanta, taking him to the place where Tom Avery lived, showing him where she could have but never would have.

He asks her why she has to recreate all of her failures, why she wants to reenact the part until she drops dead, she is always dead darling, and there will be no falling, no fainting anymore, no one to catch you wishing in a well because your voice echoes too loud and too long for such shallow waters.

_It is some kind of obsession_, he warns, makes sure she is listening, and she only nods, la-dee-da, with the look in her eyes like she is staring through windows.

Caroline pulls into the gas station, lets the radio stay on and drain the battery while she leaves the driver's door open and rounds the car to fill the tank. The sun wheels like a ball over the beach, it is bright and painful and magnifying, a kiss made of muslin and burning rod iron, the best kind of summer. She watches the numbers go up on the price, too much, too little, too expensive, too late.

_There is always a price to freedom, _she says, makes sure he is listening, and he only nodes, ho-hum, with the smirk on his lips like a clown, teeth jammed with lipstick.

They switch places.

He's driving but he's thinking about how he likes to rest, likes to think she'll take him someplace good. Likes to dream of that when the cars are going too fast and no one could ever look in and see it. Bullets moving side by side at unspeakable speeds only inches apart. This is him and her.

When she drives he is living in a movie screen, he feels like a Hollywood actor, like someone you'd take pictures of in sunglasses. He always wanted to make a zealous speech to a grand army with heavy war medals stapled to his bones, but this is good too. She is famous. Strawberry Fields or Amelia Earheart or a privateer slicing his innards straight across the middle. She is painting out panoramas and he is dreaming of manifest destiny. He should have known compasses were made from her, the only north her north, the only west her west.

He likes to drive too. He likes to drive her down old roads to see if she can make new countries of them. He imagines her making the speeches in front of a red banner in Virginia – picnics and pinwheels and daffodils. He imagines her with scars on her lips. Caroline would look good in a uniform. It makes him thinks of shoals and shipwrecks and rescue.

Magellan would have liked her.

Klaus pulls out of the gas station, Caroline is putting her bare feet on the dashboard, putting her sunglasses on, putting her chair back. Klaus leaves the radio on because he knows she sleeps better with the noise. He marvels at her fear of the dark and the silence, his eyes catch his reflection in the rear view mirror before he pulls onto the bypass. He wonders what she sees in him if not that.

Klaus drives slow. He likes to drive through the summer heat like he is driving through water. Like he is driving through otherness and the deep blue sea. He likes to melt like a glacier, he likes to flood the earth and drown people.

If she is sleeping, he'll put his hand out of the window like she does, he'll weave his fingertips through the wind in the most aerodynamic way possible, he'll feel the blue sky like a foreign country and the wind in his teeth like a mutt and the sour lemon sun like her worst insults, scorching and perfect and unfair.

He wonders why she always knows the wrong thing to say, how she got good at that, why she seems so good at so many bad things.

He wonders why the other people in the cars around them are even trying. They don't have much longer left. Won't they feel like fish swimming under the windshields, hot and cooked and doomed. He wonders if she knows he can fly a single engine plane. He wonders if she knows he owns acres of cocaine in Columbia.

Klaus likes The Ramones. They remind him of killing, of killing and clean water and loud whistles telling you where to go and where to hide and that the air raids are coming. He turns up the radio and lets Caroline sleep, lets her sleep without his thoughts affixed to her body, lets her in peace. He thinks of her hair in his teeth for comfort, of his ear against her chest, of sleeping someplace safe.

He thinks of his mother and tart blackberries in the woods where he grew up. He thinks of consuming her heart with aching new fangs, how it tasted like fruit and preserves and fresh water. How her sinews were like long shreds of roots to boil in tea. He thinks one day he will tell Caroline the place where the white oak grew, the one that could take their eternal life away, is where her childhood home now rests. They burnt it out and something else grew in its place that could kill him.

There is a rest area in two miles.

Klaus eats a cheeseburger, pulls back the lips of the paper covering with his hands and the empty place where his daylight ring once rested. Caroline asks for a piece and he gives her a fry instead. They are parked and parched and Caroline's hair is flat and summered and heavy. _You didn't share with me_, he reminds her, the body in the backseat limp and green like the Cyclops.

Caroline laughs loud enough to kick tectonic plates. Klaus feels sulfur heave inside of him and is surprised the buildings are still standing. He looks at the sky like a child does. He looks like he has witnessed nuclear clouds. He is always surprised the tar doesn't crack and the blooms don't whither from the trees when she breathes, like she is something seismic. Maybe his is the only earth undone by her. Maybe they speak to each other like planets speak to each other, like planets speak to each other in the black of space, silently, in a language too incomprehensible for even him.

* * *

The traffic in Atlanta is terrifying. He has never been a daredevil.

Elijah used to pretend those things. Elijah with his broad grin and over-estimated blade-swing, always too much around the centripetal force, always wide enough to catch attention, never clean enough to kill. He'd let his brother boast to the flaxen-haired girls, watch him casually lean on the hilt of his blade, brag loudly until the trees curled from the heat of it. All of his words gave the air halitosis.

The girls had pale smiles and granite eyes that were white like smoke.

Klaus observed how their hips mimicked his brother's shoulders.

How their hips never mimicked his shoulders.

Klaus the wordless, with the mathematical process behind his swing, his dodge, his parry. Klaus figuring velocity and force, taking into account body mass, experience, and overconfidence. That was easy with men in those days. Klaus with the sorrowless angles in his blade, his notes etched into the margins of their lives (clubbed foot – go left, glaucomic eye – sink right, formerly broken wrist—fake and turn), the frightening precision and unbidden accuracy of his understanding. No one notices the pixels of a monster.

He'd never let Elijah win, he'd never let him forget he'd lost each round after the girls rounded the dirt paths and the woods swallowed them behind a mouth of coniferous teeth. How Elijah's gaze lingered after them and faltered somewhere under the stench of pine.

_Remember 'lijah, war is not a contest of style. It is a contest of survival. _

Elijah grinned again, lunged.

Klaus was never quite sure if he had listened. It was always that way.

Elijah hid behind his shield his first day into battle.

He confessed it to him in the soulless hours of the night. He had streaked his face with the blood of a dead man, crouched behind a tree and breathed hard and heavy and vomited from the sheer electric pressure of his heart. His guilt had spilled from his mouth like locusts, like centipedes, dishonorable things that crawled through the empty silver Valhalla of his bones.

Elijah wore nervous eyes and thin breath around their father from then on, father who knew nothing.

Father who had never seen the agony in his brother's eyes, who had never felt the merciless strength of Elijah's tanned knuckles around his wrists, seen the liquid in his lashes like rain slicking branches on the eve of war, heard the whispers of nauseous fear and the breathless pleading for _any more advice_, _brother?_

_Elijah and all of his arachnids,_ Klaus would think.

Klaus thinks of the Atlanta traffic like this battlefield.

His thoughts bleed through time like tea in hot water, eyes scanning the highway, and he finds a sable black 2014 Lincoln MKS that reminds him of Elijah.

There is a red Dodge '64 Dart that keeps creeping up on its bumper, teasing the impeccable paint job with disaster. The type of damage insurance could never pay off, if they even had insurance. He imagines the Dodge '64 Dart to be death. He watches the Lincoln switch lanes with a haughty jerk of the wheel, fear in nice hubcaps. Elijah is safe again.

Elijah has chauffeurs and jetplanes now, but Klaus always had transmission fluid and good depth perception.

Klaus looks over to Caroline, but she is already looking at him.

She knows about the cars. He can see it in her eyes.

He suddenly feels the irrational dread that she might know everything. That she might know about Elijah's secret and his promise to keep it. That she might know how swift he is with a sword and how the glacial-eyed girls never splintered out sunlight over his shoulders, shoulders that grew bleached and cold like birch. That she might know what it looked like in the damp lodge, with the purple smoke rising in corkscrews to the thatched ceiling, when he would fall asleep next to a dying fire and his brother. The only place he could fall asleep. The only sleep worth having.

She stares at him, looks at him like people look at places they used to live.

She moves a thumb over his brow, swipes the sweat from the summer heat. The toxins come out. She protects his eye, smears her thumb on the seat cushion, asks him if he can drive faster than sixty. They aren't ready for the blue plate special quite yet – at least she isn't, but she isn't a like billion or whatever.

She looks sidelong at the superorbital arch of his brow again, his cheekbone.

It's like thatched roofing with purple smoke, bruises, and ideas he keeps on his lips. He looks hollowed. She leans over the glove compartment, traces a vein on his hand with her fingers.

_Remember NASCAR? _she says.

Klaus remembers the Whistling Post bar in Covington. He remembers the fuming racecars spiraling around the track on the TVs and Caroline's red face from all of the Jameson. He remembers telling her that people really watch for the accidents. That they like the thrill of death. That everyone longs for it.

She said, _It's summer._ _They just like to be together. Not everything has to do with you._

As she leans back she spills the iced tea with her elbow and it feels cold through his jeans. He remembers it's hot out, she is wearing purple, she smells like smoke on a barbecue over grapefruit rind.

Grilled peaches.

Good war.

* * *

Atlanta is smoldering.

He wonders why she likes it like this, why she doesn't mind when her sneakers liquefy onto the sidewalk and her hair is plastered down from perspiration on her forehead. She says she likes to shower off all of the grime, she stays in their hotel bathroom for hours. She comes out like an orange stripped of its skin, sweet and soft and naked.

There are towels all over the bathroom floor. He looks at himself through the haze of steam, runs a wolf palm over the mirror. He sees his eyes, sockets that are dense like Indian ink.

He takes a shower too.

Klaus feels like summer has left his bones unvarnished. He doesn't know what he has left to stand on, if his pillars were chipped from permafrost. If daylight strode away from his arctic curve and now he is forced to stand at noon.

Klaus feels Caroline's kiss like ocean water, salty and stripped.

She steps into the shower with him, cups his jaw and leans her face up. She is sand in his teeth, she is exfoliating his skin with her shell palms, she is catching his tongue like a pink starfish. The shower is dark and hot.

Klaus feels like he is fished, like he is a swordfish, or something equally oily from the deep depths, he is thrashing and his dark scales are coruscating in the breached light, a heat lamp that burns filets into all his muscles. Caroline is a woman laughing in an orange bikini, she has sunglasses on and the motor of the boat is roaring, she is going to hang him on her mantle, she is going to eat him up. She is going to sell him to The Red Lobster or Long John Silvers. He is going to be a discount sandwich left in someone's car for too long.

But it isn't true, he realizes quickly, of course and like always. That massive relief is like a tide welling up and washing over him, and suddenly he understands summer a little bit, he understands how she presses her lips to his and makes cold afternoon fruit punch out of their mouths. He understands that her laugh is like a tri-colored umbrella twirling in the sand, all shady and cool and never enough.

He understands that there is blood in the summer, good clean blood, good clean beet sugar worth drinking.

He drinks her.

This is the thing, with the Ramones and the stench of tire rubber he has become American in July. He tastes something like flares, like sparking and gunpowder, and firepits on the beach. Her heartbeat makes him feel patriotic.

She is wearing sunglasses again, her hair is pulled back until her forehead gleams, her blonde hair is clean and gilded like silk, she has sandals and a yellow summer dress made of cotton cinched at her waist like a claw, and he finds himself jealous.

The heat reminds him of Jerusalem. He looks somewhere for Calvary Hill. Expects to see a dead man on a cross, but he sees little children on picnic blankets and mothers with minivans. He sees traffic jams and sunglasses on noses, like a hoard of bugs traveling anywhere, beetles in lines along the road.

Caroline makes him buy a hotdog on the sidewalk and his hair is already damp with sweat again. He could sweat for centuries. His whole body is a poison. There would be a single grain of sand left from him if it all came out.

She could make a necklace out of his grains of sand.

The traffic is loud.

His jeans are ripped from the zipper of his suitcase. He is wearing a pair of mirror-lens Ray Bans she bought him as a joke at a truck stop around Augusta. She bought sour watermelon candies. He ate the whole bag. His neck is slicked with sweat and the necklaces rest on his clean summer bones.

She is saying something about going swimming.

He thinks it is the most absurd thing in the world, in this hell pit city where the windows slide off the buildings, where the car tops sizzle metallic mirages, where the trees revel in the carbon dioxide. But he agrees, says anything to agree with her, would believe that there was an ocean in the middle of Little Five Points if she decided to have delusions of a tide.

There are the distant bells of ice cream trucks and the loud punches of reggae from a truckbed, people are wheeling words over his head and across the avenues, the ferris wheel at Piedmont Park is clacking out metal onto metal and making him dizzy, he can smell the gasoline used in themepark rides. Caroline keeps buying streetfood—pretzels and popcorn and popsicles. Her mouth turns into a blue and magenta flower from the food dye.

The sun has melted their bodies into tubes of color, coiled up in cotton, oils and acrylics and all mediums mixed up.

He could dip a brush in her mouth, touch the white of her sunblock teeth and a paint a better bible.

He could make a Sunday from the acrid citrus of her dress and the water breaking waves of her slights.

Klaus feels like he can taste char and draft beer and good music.

He almost forgets why they came here.

He wants to forget.

He feels the arthritis softening in his synovial joints, the emphysema in his lungs clearing like mist burns at midday. He feels the dryness of winter in his cavities opening up and breathing. He feels humidity in his heart when he looks at her.

* * *

Caroline is talking to a boy with a guitar. She keeps saying, _Tom Avery, my friend Tom Avery lived here, I'm just visiting from Virginia. My friend is from New Orleans._

Klaus keeps hearing Kol's voice in his head.

He keeps hearing Kol's voice in his head telling him that _there isn't enough formaldehyde in the shed_, that he wonde_rs if I would have become a warlock like mother said if we all hadn't turned_, that he was always the _naturally gifted one in the family,_ that he's _bored in Tanzania without anyone to pester do come brother and bring sister, won't you_?, that he accidentally killed Archduke Ferdinand and started World War I, except that it was never accidental.

Kol is _screaming_ from the dagger shoved into his chest, he is prying it out even as his body simultaneously decomposes. His skin is turning to jade paper leaves and the dagger is getting heavier and heavier in his hands, like a dense piece of Jupiter falling through planet Earth.

He is always too late.

A little too late. Klaus told him so.

Kol won't ever agree, and he supposes you can't ask him now.

1914 was a good year, Kol was a good vintage. Tangy and terrible and legendary.

But it's not 1914 anymore, it's one hundred years later.

Kol is dead now, evaporated, memory to be forgotten.

Kol is like peppercorn in your teeth and Klaus keeps trying to pick it out, keeps hearing his brother's voice in between the shark tank zoom of ten wheelers. Caroline has a blood-colored electrolyte drink to her lips and she notices Klaus looks dizzy. She puts a hand on his chest, fans her palm in front of his eyes. Thinks he might be overheated.

He is pushing hands off his body, _hands?_ Yes, more than one pair, his vision is clearing, he begins to see the small crowd of people with hipster trucker hats and high-waisted shorts gathered around him, blotches of red edible skin and offensive neon sunglasses.

Caroline is kneeling in front of him, Caroline doesn't have her hands on him.

_Are you okay, man?_

_Does he need some water?_

_Dude, you almost wiped it._

Caroline is saying something like, _thanks, we're okay_ and the crowd is dispersing. She is smiling up at him with teeth that are almost sharp enough to be fangs. He wonders if she always looked so deadly. Her eyes curl like the moon does when it arches into a crescent and he wants to arch vertebrae and howl at her. Rub his hair near her mouth. Scrape at the place in the earth where her light pools.

_What was that?_ he asks, scowling, realizing he is sitting on an overturned milk crate beside a food truck.

_People caring_, Caroline answers.

She presses the back of her hand to his forehead and he gives her a strange look.

Her laughter rises like sugarcane, strong and sweet, _don't look at me like that. You're the one that nearly bit it._

He stands up, hand finding her hip for balance, eyes betraying no shame.

His hands look like regular hands. His eyes look like regular eyes.

_I didn't know hybrids could pass out in the sun_, she says, handing him the electrolyte drink.

He didn't know either.

But winter caves that way.

* * *

There is another summer song.

One that is the opposite of scorching pan fried eggs and hair stuck to cheekbones and legs stuck to hot car seats.

It is the rain.

The southern rain like rattling souls in a tin cup. Colored bottles hanging from tree branches. Beads on fence posts.

Fresh water.

Little whirlpools of cool air descending from the sky to the grass. Sprinklers. A sea for the bereft.

See, honesty is in the rain.

That is what water does. It makes you honest. It makes you ugly. It makes you free.

The rain is warm too, like the earth.

_So this is what she meant by swimming,_ Klaus thinks. He thinks this pressed up under an awning on the side of Old Tucker Road in Decatur. The cowlicks in Caroline's hair are soaked. Her nose is speckled with water. Her sandals are ruined.

It looks like she can breathe for once. He can't take his eyes from her.

She is liquefied tangerine. Muscles liquid, bones liquid, breath liquid. She is luminous and her skin is glossy with rainwater, like her second skin has come out. Like she was meant to be a swimming thing.

Her eyes are closed.

His tongue has never been more dry.

He wonders where she hid her gills.

He cannot tear his eyes from her, he has discovered a waterfall, she is going to _get him, she is going to get him_. It is crashing down around his ears, blowing out his eardrums with blood and fluid, it is crashing down around his ears like the boots of poachers in the Congo, wet thick leaves and wet thick silence.

Dutchmen looking for rubber with violence.

He feels incomplete suddenly.

He is a creature full of infarct tissue and yet his capillaries open for one small second. Like a mistake. Like an accident.

He has made ten thousand widows, he has walked unscathed through musketfire, he has eaten villages and remained hungry and moved on to cities.

Never though has he felt it so keenly – the forgotten taste of water against the reality of blood.

She has her eyes closed and her back against the red bricks and her dress is soaked through like she has always had her ribs cracked open, always opening a breast stroke.

He is bone dry and he wants to touch her.

He wonders if this is what the molten earth felt towards the first ocean.

Klaus thinks it will take a billion years to cool him down.

All of his black volcanic deformation.

He begins to see himself in the world again.

He hates Decatur and he loves it.

* * *

_Tom Avery_ _loved his job, _Caroline says. She has been saying the same thing for two days.

She has been talking and talking like she is unable to do anything else.

She makes her own radio, and Klaus interrupts here and there, a commercial break, but it always goes back to her. He wonders what would happen if the signal went out. He wonders what she would be if she wasn't radiowaves and good morning talk shows and a forecast saying sunshine is always around the corner.

He knows what she would be.

She would be a summer night.

They are walking back to the hotel and the sun has been pressed out, sizzled into darkness like from fingers and saliva pinched over a flame.

Klaus sees the stars overhead, the oppressive July heat is beating around his body like a giant black heart.

That would be Caroline, should her light steam away.

She would be crystal clear summer constellations rimmed with horrible, endless space. She would be the frightening promise of new worlds and galaxies and yet no space ships booming overhead from Cape Canaveral, like they do in August. She would be heat in the navy blue, she would be warm dark ocean teeming with teeth under the moon.

He finds such peace in this, this exhausting temperature, his body coming apart piece by piece, and even her darkness lubricates his rigid plaques and dry fingernails. Even her darkness makes him want to shed his skin like a serpent. To clean himself, lick his paws bare. He can be camouflaged too, he can see the path by even her deep, dark moonlight.

Caroline stops dead as they walk.

He turns to face her, and she is crying.

His eyes are drawn upward to the heat lightning and the errant roar of thunder.

He stares at her until she speaks.

_I killed him_, she says. It comes clattering out of her mouth like kids taking cannonballs into lakes over a rope swing.

He is the tree.

She is swinging from him. He is sturdy and she runs from miles away, her momentum is stupendous.

This is vacation.

* * *

Caroline takes Klaus to the car garage where Tom Avery died.

To the place where it was said she could but she wouldn't.

She explains she wanted to save him, that she captained a ship and threw out a red and white life ring, that she spotted him from the greatest distance through a telescope and how she was not a pirate, not a pirate but a politician instead.

Klaus is knelt on the concrete in the echoing night. He is smelling car oil and stilled engines and gasoline. He rubs his thumb on the scene of the crime. Sucks the dirt off and eats it.

Caroline feels like she let Tom Avery drown.

Klaus is trying to figure out what Tom Avery means.

What part of her psyche he had brought hurling to the surface, like a white whale ripped from the depths and beached, writhing and dehydrating on the shore, dry mouth opening and closing, eyes solid. Beachgoers take pictures. Stare. Yes, death is pretty. People don't even realize how they marvel, how they keep and store away, how they add that sand to their time keeper. How they prepare.

Caroline shakes her head over again, _Nothing, _she says, _nothing he was just one guy._

Klaus tries to imagine for one second being so dismantled by the death of one _guy_.

It is the attempt that is utterly astounding.

* * *

Klaus makes raspberry blood bruises in her hips. Little starbursts of molten rose on ivory.

She pulls his hair by the roots, grows sunflowers in his scalp, eats his throat like someone drinking pink lemonade.

They move like black bandits through the silver bars of starlight.

Klaus kisses Caroline and reminds her that death comes to everyone, that this is what is fair.

He supposes she believes him, the way she cries out.

He has never heard her sound so relieved.

* * *

They leave Atlanta earlier than she would have liked.

But that is the truth of it, months of perfect heat always too short.

It's easy to wish for more relief, because no one ever gets it.

See, summer is not meant to ease, it is there to make you better at wishing.

Klaus drives through South Carolina.

They only stop once. They stop at Pedro's South of the Border. It's a campground, and he makes sour Caroline come out from the car. They walk past bleached building after building shaped like sombreros, Mexican dancing girls, Aztec pyramids, piñatas, Chihuahuas and mini golf courses build to look like the beaches of Cancun.

Klaus drags Caroline into the cheap mercado shop, and he watches as her eyes slowly light up again.

In fifteen minutes she is wearing a poncho, wielding two wooded six-shooters, and has a patch over her eye.

He takes a pack of candy cigarettes and she fashions him a gun holster. She pulls a striking black hat over his short hair like Josey Wales, gives him a bullet sash strung from shoulder to hip. He lets her dress him up, he likes her hands on him, he remembers salmon colored suns setting in California in 1849.

_Now dance! _she shouts, shooting him with the pistols.

He flashes to her, kisses her under the nighttime rim of his sharp black hat.

She pushes him off. She buys the poncho. She buys the hat.

They eat cheese fries on a picnic bench outside the cafeteria. The building has a turtle with a thick black mustache and a Mexican flag draped around his shoulders painted onto the side of it.

They are two banditos.

She has stolen everything from him, and he has stolen everything from her.

They murder and eat six people in their costumes.

And they will never be caught.

* * *

Caroline drives through North Carolina.

She obeys every speed limit.

She drives in the slow lane.

She keeps stopping for bathroom breaks.

Klaus asks her if she wants to come back with him, and she scoffs.

* * *

It is raining, monsooning across the highway and Klaus puts the flashers on and Caroline is wide awake and the cars in front of them are slowing and stopping at random frightened intervals, it is easy to mark the tourists from the southerners – the careful family drivers crawling through the white-washed freeway, and the locals spraying water like a round of bullets as they speed through undeterred.

It's impossible to see, but with hybrid eyes he can make it.

The noise against the roof of the car is so loud, it's like Bonnie and Clyde's last minute. There are holes everywhere. There are holes in her and holes in him.

She hesitates, shouts over the racket, _what happened to Rebekah?_

He snarls, _she betrayed me._

She rolls her eyes.

He scowls in her direction, hand steady on the wheel. _What happened to the witch? To Damon?_

She screams over the rain, _they're dead, all dead. _

Klaus grins, it spreads over his teeth like a man revealing a knife in his coat.

_You will never be free of me_.

She grabs the wheel, lurches it, they crash into the barrier in the pouring rain.

* * *

Their bodies are blurred in the deluge. The cars speeding by would miss them, their forms, the way their clothes lay soaked and limp against their frames like wet dark leaves, the way her hair obscures her red eyes and furious teeth. He is standing a few feet from her. His eyes are pitless and slammed full of nothing.

She shoves him.

His laughter is like the screeching of crows, each clawing their way out of the sounds with sharp black nails and blue feet. The rain is slamming down between them.

_It was a joke, sweetheart! _he shouts, but she is feral and angry.

He can see the blur of grass and trees behind her. Tall trees that rise like serpents, that rise like the old gods and chastise him.

_You're a joke! _she spits it back, her shout is high-pitched, nearly lost under the rampage of rain.

She disappears before he can respond.

* * *

He doesn't go looking for her.

That is the thing about summer. It's gone before you know it.

When he returns to New Orleans he could dive through the humidity. He thinks of her and he thinks of popsicles and turpentine and the clean silk of her hair. He thinks of his bones becoming gelatinous and the sun on shoulders, never burning. He remembers passing out. He remembers licking the dirt and the residue taste of Tom Avery's soul.

He tells his people to hold off the massacre.

There are more mosquitos than usual this season. Even monsters get bitten by mosquitos.

He has someone candy ticks, and he eats them, crunching and letting their blood-filled bodies splatter into his throat.

That was Kol's idea. Dead Kol like dead Tom Avery.

He thinks about sending them to Caroline with a bow, he thinks about her marshmallows and her soft pretzels and her ferris wheel.

He thinks she won't speak to him until at least Christmas.

He thinks about the dark shower and her pink starfish tongue.

He thinks about the ocean, and he orders his brother to open up the windows. To let the air in. To grow sunflowers from the bodies buried in the backyard.

Klaus lets the witches have their parade, after all.

They make fireworks, rose-colored fireworks and the crescent city smiles.

Klaus feels good but not whole.

* * *

Caroline is in Virginia.

She is holed up in the Salvatore manor with a grieving friend.

She closes up his wounds with a salve made from black bark and soft words. The forest huddles around the boarding the house, eclipsing all light. She opens the shades, draws the curtains, pulls apart the shutters, leaves the doors splayed wide. But it is still dark.

She makes watermelon lemonade, triangle slices swirling in the ice and suspended in the cold water, but no one drinks it.

Caroline walks through Damon's silent room. She washes the sheets where he slept with her best friend. She dusts his things so it won't seem like he's gone forever. She puts on his records and knows her friend will hear them playing through the house.

She twirls the vinyl over and over in her hand, sitting in the warm dark by the record player.

She looks across the rings on the wide black disc.

The heat from the window seeps down to her cool knees, the air smells like oleander.

She decides everyone will be free, that they will find a way.

It is still heavenly summer, and here she believes.

* * *

He calls her twice, knowing she won't answer.

She is on a swing at the old elementary school in town, beside Stefan who is quiet. Silent as the bible to the illiterate. He swings distractedly. He is looking towards the woods, waiting.

Klaus is always there, lingering on the edges of life like someone selling dangerous and painless drugs in a park.

The first time he called was when Stefan wanted to take off his daylight ring. She saw the kind of darkness in her friend's eyes that there is no end to, the kind of darkness that doesn't come from or lead to anywhere. It reminded her of his voice, somehow. It reminded her that shadows don't always follow light. She heard him, asking for her over the crescent bayou. She heard him willing her near because he is selfish and needy.

And she is needed.

* * *

The second time was when her phone lit up at two in the morning. She pressed her palm into her mouth, strangled the sobs.

_Stop calling, _she thought, coiling her fingers over the phone. Suffocating the light.

_Stop calling_.

The summer breeze picks up the still night air and brushes over the tip of her nose, the coolness of her tears.

It reminds her that she doesn't have to answer.

And he feels it from miles away.

It becomes obvious to her.

They will all be okay.

They will all be okay.

It resonates within her like the ocean, back and forth, and she is reminded of the beach. The night recedes at the thought, galloping away from her dreams like a frightened army on horseback.

This is sticky summer, never quite what you wish for, exactly what you wanted.

She is stronger, keener. He is hungrier, weaker.

* * *

The moon follows her like a loyal dog as she walks through the house, it reminds her of him.

She leans against the dark wood of the house, feels the black heat all around her. She feels so warm, like the sunlight saved over time still emanates in the blind depths of nothingness, absorbed by the still black things, and given back when she calls for it.

This is freedom, too.

Maybe he will learn, maybe it will cause his lips to pucker like lemons do. The bitter truth.

He will never be free of her, either.

Sour like candy, pretty and hot bubblegum pink and lavender purple and lime green. The turquoise ocean and the Beach Boys playing on the radio. Fireworks in the black sky, laughing at him. Can't see them in the daytime, only at night.

He thinks they are beautiful and he knows she knows it.


End file.
